Here is Neil Gaiman holding a panda, an apt metaphor for how I feel right now.

Well, close down San Diego Comic-Con. It isn’t going to get any better than this. Sorry, other companies scrambling for coverage, but Neil Gaiman and DC Comics just exploded our brains with rainbows of splendidness. Unless you can bring J. R. R. Tolkien back from the dead to write another book, your other Hall H announcements just aren’t going to impress me. I’m looking at you, Twilight.

Last night, awesome speech giver Neil Gaiman posted a video (below) at his website and wrote, “It has been hard to keep this a secret for the last 18 months… But somehow we did.” The secret was announced at yesterday’s Vertigo Comics panel at San Diego Comic-Con. Neil Gaiman is writing a prequel miniseries to The Sandman with artist J. H. Williams III.

“When I finished writing The Sandman, there was one tale still untold,” Gaiman said. “The story of what had happened to Morpheus to allow him to be so easily captured in The Sandman #1, and why he was returned from far away, exhausted beyond imagining, and dressed for war. It was a story that we discussed telling for Sandman‘s 20th anniversary… but the time got away from us. And now, with Sandman‘s 25th anniversary year coming up, I’m delighted, and nervous, that that story is finally going to be told.” [Blastr]

The full press release is available at DC Comics, but allow us to sum it up thusly: